‘No friend of ours’: LNP look for candidate to unseat Bob Katter
National senator Susan McDonald hasn’t officially ruled out running against Bob Katter for the seat of Kennedy, but the party is hoping to find a candidate soon.
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Nationals Senator Susan McDonald has not directly ruled out the prospect of running against Bob Katter for the super-sized North Queensland electorate of Kennedy - but she is satisfied with her current position and responsibilities in the upper house.
Nominations are open for the Kennedy’s LNP candidacy and according to Ms McDonald there are several worthy options to represent more than half a million square kilometres, made up of 15 local government areas such as Mount Isa and Charters Towers, and part of six others including Cairns, Burdekin, and Townsville.
Recently at the LNP State Council in Rockhampton where 300 party supporters converged, Ms McDonald represented Nationals leader David Littleproud and said the party was determined to unseat Mr Katter.
“Just to be clear, for anybody who doesn’t understand why we in the north feel so passionately about this — Bob Katter votes with Labor 67 per cent of the time. He is not a friend of ours,” she said.
“He cannot be relied on for Peter Dutton and David Littleproud to form government.”
Ms McDonald confirmed her position to this masthead late last week, but downplayed long-held rumours that she herself could be the strong candidate needed to take on the Charters Towers based politician, who has been a politician for 50 years.
She is part of a prominent North Queensland grazing family and grew up in Cloncurry as a Mount Isa School of the Air student, ran a chain of butcher shops, and has defended the mining industry as shadow minister for resources.
But to do so she would need to step back from her senator role, which she found to be purposeful in representing the regional issues that mattered.
When asked if she would ever consider running for a seat in the lower house, Ms McDonald said, “I’ve been preselected by the LNP to run in that role and I’m incredibly lucky that I get to have a voice as a shadow northern Australian minister and the shadow resources minister, so, you know, I think it’s great that our part of the world has been recognised by the leadership team of the coalition.
“And so I’m very keen to bat on in that realm.
“And look, I am keen to take somebody else with me to Canberra along with, Phil Thompson and Andrew Wilcox and Jeremy Neal from Leichhardt.
“And to be able to take somebody else from the LNP team from Kennedy would be really great, because we’ll be a very loud voice.
“And that’s what you need, when you go to Canberra.”
During the state election Ms McDonald warned that larger regional electorates needed the representative of major parties in order to get the needed attention and focus within the party room, in a direct criticism against the KAP.
“You want to be sitting there and able to brush up to the Premier or the cabinet ministers every day and say ‘mate, you’ve got to help me with this’, and if you’re not in the room, that’s a lot harder,” Ms McDonald said at the time.
At the time, Mr Katter’s son Robbie, the party’s leader, said “it’s a peculiar statement to make” given the large multi-billion dollar infrastructure project CopperString had been committed to.
“She’s offered opinion without any evidence,” Mr Katter said.
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Originally published as ‘No friend of ours’: LNP look for candidate to unseat Bob Katter
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